Image credit: Square Enix
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will cap off the so-far spectacular Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy and looks like the biggest of the three. Once, Final Fantasy 7 Remake was a mostly linear experience set in one location, with only four playable characters.
Now, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation boasts a truly open world, even more so than the previously large Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Plus, that playable roster is expanding to eight different characters, as far as we know. However, in this expanding scope, I can’t help but feel that Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is going too far and, when it releases on 8 April 2027, it will threaten to send off the trilogy with an overstuffed and bloated farewell.
An all-too-open world
The world of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation looks truly amazing. Back in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the world was really only vaguely open. There were various maps linked together, but it wasn’t exactly a go-anywhere-do-anything style of game. Revelation, on the other hand, is embracing a far stronger sense of freedom.
Now, you establish where you’re dropping with your team anywhere on the map from the Highwind, your high-tech airship piloted by Cid. It appears there’s no real limit on this, which on one hand is an exciting idea when it comes to exploration, but ultimately comes at a cost. Whenever a game has an open world, that open world must therefore be filled with things, and quite often that ends up being fluff.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth just had some large explorable maps, and they were filled with all sorts of guff, courtesy of some Ubisoft-style towers to climb and random completable objectives just kind of dotted around. These are often less well-crafted inclusions and more just padding to make it feel like the world isn’t just a bunch of space.
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation isn’t really selling me that most of this world will have a point, as the first ‘side-activity’ on display is taking photos of random cats around the land. You can call me a grump, and I know that right now Final Fantasy 7 is priding itself on combining the dramatic and the ridiculous, but at least when Rebirth was filled with random mini-games, they had an aim to be fun. A global, feline fetch quest is the epitome of padding, and doesn’t fill me with confidence.
It just doesn’t FITS
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is also expanding out the current combat system, and not just with the new playable characters of Vincent and Cid. Rather, there’s going to be a whole new system reminiscent of the classic Final Fantasy job system. FITS, standing for Function-Integrated Tactical Suitwear, is a new way to customise characters in Revelation, and it kind of works like the class system in Final Fantasy X-2, where changing your style changed your abilities.
Now everyone likes customising outfits and weapons, and it almost feels silly to say that more flexibility in combat is a bad thing, but once again I think Revelation is conflating ‘more’ with ‘better’. You can apply one of four classes to each character, being Warrior, Knight, Black Mage, and Summoner, which leaves the character dressed up in an outfit in conflict with the world around them, and with skills that don’t really feel connected with their identity.
When playing Revelation, I want to be playing around with skills that each character actually has, rather than starting to play around with their base concepts like I had gotten bored over the last two games. In the pseudo-cyberpunk world of Final Fantasy 7, suddenly strapping any of the team with the explicitly mystical powers of a Black Mage, or putting them in suits of fantasy armour, feels like the game is fighting itself at the core.
The Remake trilogy has, so far, struggled to keep its tone consistent, as the original game had before. However, at its core, it is a pretty serious story of trying to avoid an outright apocalypse, and it feels strange for the main new combat gimmick in Revelation to want to naturally undermine its own setting.
Wait, what were we doing again?
Final Fantasy 7 Remake took a two-hour segment from the original Final Fantasy 7 and stretched it out to an over twenty-hour game, introducing how the Remake trilogy wanted to do things going forward. It wasn’t enough to just retell the original game; we were expanding, elaborating on relationships, and introducing a meta-narrative about the nature of remaking games in the first place.
I loved how Remake operated, because even though it was adding in things that weren’t in the original story, it (mostly) had a point, and the linear nature of the game meant the pacing could never get too out of hand. Nearly every choice was able to add more character to a game that was already brimming with it.
Rebirth started to lose sight of things the longer it went on, and while a lot of that was due to its new open-world nature, it was also because the story was starting to get quite unwieldy. The meta-narrative of the first game was pushing more front and centre, and was becoming more unintelligible the longer it went on. Between Costa Del Sol, the Shinra-8 Cruise Ship, and the Golden Saucer, there were multiple parts where the story ultimately stopped dead.
The Remake trilogy is trying to make the most out of its cast, and the result is simply that everyone needs more screen time to feel like they’re getting fleshed out. This has led to situations in Rebirth where you had whole, arduous segments playing as Cait Sith, or Vincent Valentine has had to pick up weird characterisation in the collectible card game side-quest.
In Revelation, the cast is fit to bursting, and with a whole world at the dev team’s fingertips, I know the dev team won’t be able to help themselves. Even though the apocalypse is coming, there’s every chance that Revelation’s desire to let you live in its world will leave Sephiroth bored, waiting for us.
FAQs
Yes, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will be the last game in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy. There’s currently no announced DLC, nor any plans to remake Dirge of Cerberus.
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is set to release on April 8, 2027 on Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S.
Always a fun question. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is the last of the Remake trilogy and is a retelling and expansion of the end of Final Fantasy 7. However, the story diverges from the original in many major ways, and in fact requires you to already understand a lot of the original story and its expansions to fully understand.
Tifa and Cloud’s relationship could best be described as ‘complicated’. There are feelings there, certainly, and it seems like the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy wants them to be together, but… well, we’ll see.
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